Researchers from Trinity College Dublin have uncovered the evolutionary mechanisms that have caused increases or decreases in the numbers of chromosomes in a group of yeast species during the last 100-150 million years. The study, to be published on July 21st in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics, offers an unprecedented view of chromosome complement (chromosome number) changes in a large group of related species. A few specific cases of chromosome number changes have been studied in plants and animals, for example the fusion of two great ape chromosomes that gave rise to chromosome 2 in humans, giving humans a chromosome count of 23 pairs compared to 24 pairs in great apes.